What I Found Instead
On leaving a senior role and finding out what you actually believe
The message came from someone I didn’t know. They’d read what I’d been writing about the job market. They told me it had helped them come back from some very dark thoughts.
I hadn’t written it for that reason. I’d written it because writing had always been how I processed things I couldn’t quite articulate yet, and there was a lot to process.
I’d left Fujitsu in February 2024, as CTO for Home Affairs & Criminal Justice. Thirty years in technology — policing, government, health, justice. I left because I wanted something different. Not another consulting role doing broadly the same work in a different building. Something purposeful rather than just profitable. I gave myself three months.
Three months became two years.
What the market was actually doing
I expected the search to go the way these things had always gone before. I had a network. I had a clear track record. In the past, a few messages sent to the right people would generate several conversations worth having. I’d done this before. It had worked.
The difference this time was silence.
Not rejection — rejection has a shape to it, something you can read and process. This was simply nothing. Roles applied for directly, through agencies, via LinkedIn. No acknowledgement. No conversation. No human response of any kind.
I spent time trying to understand it. What I found was that recruitment had collided with artificial intelligence, and the collision had broken the thing it claimed to improve. Roles were being advertised and receiving hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications — many of them generated or heavily optimised by AI tools, written to mirror job descriptions back at the reader rather than represent an actual person. On the receiving end, hiring teams had responded with AI-driven applicant tracking systems designed to filter the volume.
One side automated the submission; the other automated the screening. The human had been removed from both ends of a process that is, at its core, about whether two people might work well together.
I’d spent thirty years deploying technology into organisations. Making the business case for systems that would help people do their jobs better. Recommending implementations. I knew exactly how the efficiency argument was constructed. I had made it myself, more than once.
What I hadn’t understood, until I was on the receiving end of it, was what it actually cost the person at the other end of that efficiency.
I thought it was just me
I started posting about what I was seeing. The silence. The automated non-responses. The experience of applying for roles with thirty years of experience and no indication that anyone had read a word.
The replies were not what I expected. Not numbers — messages. People I’d never met or engaged with, writing to say the same thing: I thought it was just me. Senior professionals, people with long careers, describing the same loop. The same absence. And in some cases, something that was sliding into something more serious than frustration.
I found myself writing more honestly than I had before on any professional platform. Including about my own situation — what the extended uncertainty was doing to my mental health, and what I was doing about it. I hesitated before posting it. I was still applying for roles. A prospective employer might read it and conclude they were looking at someone not up to the pressure of a senior position. I posted it anyway, because something needed to be said that the relentless confidence performance on the feed was not saying.
The response confirmed what I’d suspected: a great many people were carrying the same weight and saying nothing publicly. When someone admitted they were struggling, it gave others permission to admit the same. That’s a small thing. It turned out to matter.
LinkedIn had changed significantly as a platform — more automated content, more generated noise, a feed that had been optimised in ways that made genuine engagement harder. But underneath the performance, there were real conversations. People working out what they believed when the institutional identity had been removed. People building something without a title to explain what they were doing.
I recognised myself in them.
What I was trying to work out
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I started writing a book. Not as a strategy — I’d always wanted to write something entirely mine, not a deliverable for someone else. I had an archive of half-finished thinking: articles, papers written for clients under other people’s names, ideas that hadn’t fitted the institutional brief. The question that kept coming back from the recruitment experience gave me the argument: what happens to human agency when the systems designed to serve us are optimised, decision by decision, to remove the human from the equation? Not as an abstract concern, but as something I’d watched happen from the inside — and then experienced from the outside in the same twelve months.
The Next Evolution was an attempt to put that honestly.
The second book followed from a question the first couldn’t answer. If human agency is at risk, if the systems are increasingly making decisions that used to belong to people, what does that do to how we think? The Cognitive Cruciblewent into the cognitive consequences of that shift — what it means when the friction of thinking is progressively removed, and whether that is always the improvement it is presented as.
The third took a different direction again. The Shadow System looked at what it means for security — cyber and otherwise — when the human and cognitive layers are already under pressure. Each book reached a conclusion that opened a question I hadn’t anticipated. None of this arc was planned.
The planned fourth book - The Human Nexus - has been put aside for now, after producing the first printed draft I found it was wrong. So book 4 is now something very different.
What changed between the first book and the third was the argument itself. I started writing with a conviction that AI and technology, used properly, could serve human purposes better than they currently did. I still think that. But what I encountered in the research, and in the market, and in the conversations at conferences and events, was an industry that had run hard into a hype cycle built on fundamentally misleading claims about what AI actually is. The technology had started driving the business rather than the other way around.
Companies were deploying AI not because it answered a real question but because not deploying it felt like falling behind. And the noise had become loud enough that it was drowning out genuine capability in other areas — things that could do real and measurable things for people, ignored because they were not the story of the year.
That shift wasn’t something I decided. It’s what the evidence produced.
The only way to understand what these tools actually were, rather than what they claimed to be, was to use them.
Like most people, I tried things. I used ChatGPT at one point to write a short fictional story for LinkedIn — a deliberate exercise to see what the technology actually produced when given a specific creative task. It produced something. I read it and understood something about the gap between generating text and writing from a position. The thing it produced had no argument. It had no view. It was fluent and empty in roughly equal measure.
What I’ve arrived at since is different. I use AI tools now as part of how I work — to surface topics worth exploring, to research what is happening in a given area, to draft briefings I can review and challenge, and to generate image prompts for article visuals. Assistive tools, in the specific sense: they help me get to the thinking faster. They don’t replace the thinking.
The ideas are mine. The opinions are mine. The argument in anything I publish is mine. The tool sits in the preparation, not the position.
That distinction is not a disclaimer. It’s a description of what these tools actually do well. They are good at research breadth and the groundwork that precedes judgment. They are not good at holding a view or having something at stake. That part remains stubbornly human — and, after two years of watching organisations act as if it didn’t, I’m more convinced of that than when I started.
The work that made sense
The work I took on during this period was fractional — advisory across multiple clients rather than a single employer. That was not a strategic choice. It was what was available, and I took it.
What I didn’t expect was how different it felt from working inside an institution. When your client is also your employer, what you recommend passes, consciously or otherwise, through what the organisation needs to hear. Working outside that structure, the relationship was simpler. I was there to give an honest assessment, and then I moved on. No stake in the political outcome.
I’m still looking for the right permanent role — there is work I want to do that requires the continuity that fractional work doesn’t provide. But I came out of that period with clarity about what I won’t trade away in exchange for a title. The writing is the main one. Two years of producing work that is entirely mine — not filtered through institutional interest, not shaped by what an organisation needs to project — has made that condition non-negotiable. That narrows the field. I’m comfortable with that.
Getting back into the room
I started attending conferences again. Not to promote anything — the books were still being written. I went because time outside an organisation changes your calibration. You lose the ambient sense of what the industry is actually doing. The corridor conversations. The things people say when they’re not on stage.
What I found at events was a version of the confusion I’d seen in the job market, operating at a different level. Conversations at the executive tier that were often disconnected from the operational reality underneath them. Senior roles defined in ways that created genuine ambiguity about who was responsible for what. AI positioned as the answer to questions that hadn’t been asked clearly in the first place. Empire-building dressed up as strategy.
But there were also people thinking carefully and asking uncomfortable questions. Companies approaching technology the right way — starting with the business problem, then asking honestly whether AI could help or whether it was the wrong tool for the specific challenge in front of them. Not against the technology. Just thinking first.
And there were people who had seen exactly what I’d seen from inside the industry, and gone off to build something because of it. Founders who had watched recruitment, or talent management, or the way organisations make decisions about people, and decided to try to put back what had been lost.
Talking to those people is a different conversation from anything I’d had inside a large organisation. The passion is still intact. The conviction that the thing being built is the right thing hasn’t yet been optimised out of them. That’s worth finding.
Why I write here
I’d been building a website to hold the articles. It became, fairly quickly, the wrong problem to be solving — hard to build, difficult to maintain, entirely beside the point of what I was trying to do. What I wanted was somewhere to write, not somewhere to manage infrastructure.
I moved to Substack because it is a platform built for writing. Long-form, with a direct relationship between writer and reader that doesn’t depend on what an algorithm decides to show. The website now links to the Substack rather than hosting anything itself. LinkedIn points people towards the writing rather than being where the writing lives. It took longer than it should have to arrive at that arrangement.
The Next Evolution is where I put the thinking I want to keep. Not everything — just the work I’d want to read back in five years and still recognise as mine.
What I was slower to see
One thing I knew throughout all of this, without fully reckoning with it until recently, was the impact on my family.
I’ve said to teams I’ve managed that family is what allows us to do the work we do — that the support at home is what makes the professional commitment possible. I meant it when I said it. What I hadn’t understood, until now, was how much I was drawing on it.
The support isn’t conscious or deliberate. It is simply there when needed. But that doesn’t mean it comes without cost. My family carries a level of stress and worry that isn’t often said aloud — questions not raised, anxiety not named, steadiness maintained even when the situation makes steadiness hard. That weight exists whether or not anyone chooses to mention it.
Being properly aware of that changes how the situation feels. Not in a way that produces guilt, that’s not useful to anyone. But in a way that makes clear that whatever I decide next reaches further than my own circumstances. I am not navigating this alone. What I choose affects people who didn’t choose to be part of the decision.
What hasn’t resolved yet
Two years on, things look different from what I expected in February 2024.
I’m in conversations with founders and investors about what they’re building — people for whom the work is still the point, and the passion for it is still visible. I’m advising on technology for public safety, working on problems with real consequences. I’m writing — three books published, more planned. And I’m still looking for the right permanent role: C-suite, a few days a week, in an organisation where I can do substantive work without giving up what I’ve built outside it. Somewhere with a clear purpose that wants someone to help them achieve real outcomes.
The tension between those two things isn’t resolved. Not because I think they’re incompatible, I don’t, but because the role that genuinely allows both hasn’t arrived yet.
What I came out of the last two years with was clarity about what I believe and where I stand. I didn’t have that when I left. I thought I did — thirty years in the industry, senior enough to have formed opinions. But the opinions I held were filtered through the institutions I was in. What came out when I was no longer in any of them was something more honest, and more mine.
That’s not a lesson I was looking for. It arrived anyway.
You’re reading The Next Evolution by Neil Catton, articles that explore the human world and the intersection of technology, they try and ask difficult questions - not to scare - but to inform. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe free at neilcatton.substack.com.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System - available on Amazon, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.